Your recent remarks about how you believe 9-11 could have been prevented
certainly got lots of attention, especially as your commission will soon be
holding hearings that might include questioning of high officials in the Bush
administration. One of the unintended consequences of your remark may be the
high state of alert the government now has in place, accompanied by all kinds
of orders to foreign governments on what they can fly and what they can't fly
into American airports. The NYTimes this morning reports air travel
dropping off sharply as Americans cancel domestic as well as foreign flights
they had planned.

We all expect your commission to come up with the kinds of
"defensive" actions that might have been taken in the months leading
up to 9-11, which would have spoiled the terrorist act. If so, I do think you
will still be barking up the wrong tree. By that I mean you should instead be
exploring the reason for 9-11 that was in the minds of the men who were
willing to die in the process of carrying out their act of terror. As far as I
can tell, this will no be part of your commission's work, as it may be too hot
to handle. You may recall, Tom, I sent you the following "memo on the
margin" soon after you were appointed to chair the commission. It is one
I wrote and e-mailed to Vice President Cheney on September 12, the day after
the Twin Towers came down. It replicated yet another memo I'd written on
January 13, 1998, a memo to then Sen. Jesse Helms who chaired the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. Note my 1998 comment: "There is no reason to
disbelieve that if there is a next time, the mind of that terrorist will
succeed in taking the twin towers down completely."

My hope is that you do find room in the commission's schedule to address these
issues, for if they are not, I don't believe any color-coded defensive alerts
can win "the war on terrorism."

Remember me telling you in January that I felt better about a Bush presidency
knowing you would be Vice President, because you seemed to have the confidence
of the Arab world. With the outburst of terrorism, we need that resource more
than ever. Please read the memo I wrote to Jesse Helms, “The Mind of a
Terrorist,” in 1998, which keyed off the statement made by the terrorist who
bombed the World Trade Center in 1997, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. Before he was
sentenced, he told the court why he did what he did, and I wrote to Senator
Helms that unless we understood his motivations and adjusted our behavior to
take it into account, “the mind of that terrorist will succeed in taking the
Twin Towers down completely.” I hope you take my comments seriously, as
Helms did not, and represent them as our government struggles with this
enormous problem and how we should deal with it.

Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the man who planned the terrorist bombing of the World
Trade Center, was sentenced to life imprisonment last week in Federal District
Court in Manhattan. A fragment of his statement to the court was published in
on January 9, Page B4. I doubt that a handful of Americans read it, but it
occurs to me that you should read it carefully, given the enormous burden you
have in helping shape U.S. foreign policy. It may help you understand the mind
of a terrorist, which is the kind of thinking that poses thi>e greatest
threat to the security of American citizens now that the threat of communism
has been dissolved. I’m afraid Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy, in response to
Yousef, failed to grasp the political essence of the defendant’s remarks and
incorrectly drew the conclusion that Yousef has developed a taste for death in
the Afghanistan war. In reading Yousef’s statement, Senator, put aside your
anger for what he did, and listen to his message, if only to learn the mind of
a terrorist in order to develop defenses against it:

You keep talking also about
collective punishment and killing innocent people to force governments to
change their policies; you call this terrorism when someone would kill
innocent people or civilians in order to force the government to change its
policies. Well, when you were the first one who invented this terrorism.

You were the first one who killed innocent people, and you are the first one
who introduced this type of terrorism to the history of mankind when you
dropped an atomic bomb which killed tens of thousands of women and children
in Japan and when you killed over a hundred thousand people, most of them
civilians, in Tokyo with fire bombings. You killed them by burning them to
death. And you killed civilians in Vietnam with chemicals as with the
so-called Orange agent. You killed civilians and innocent people, not
soldiers, innocent people every single war you went. You went to wars more
than any other country in this century, and then you have the nerve to talk
about killing innocent people.

And now you have invented new ways to kill innocent people. You have
so-called economic embargo which kills nobody other than children and
elderly people, and which other than Iraq you have been placing the economic
embargo on Cuba and other countries for over 35 years...

The government in its summations and opening said that I was a terrorist.
Yes, I am a terrorist and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism so long
as it was against the United States Government and against Israel, because
you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and
using it every day. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites. (Ramzi Ahmed
Yousef)

In fact, Senator, everything Yousef
says here has some truth to it. Of course I still believe his life sentence is
justified and I would not have any problem with a death penalty. Still, I
believe his motivation in his terrorist act is exactly as he says it was, that
it was a political act which he justified in his own mind on the grounds that
something had to be done and no government was willing to act on the cause in
which he believes. In the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh also
justified his terrorist act as that of an avenging angel, choosing a federal
building as his target, not the innocents who happened to be there at the
time. Terrorism is a political act. It is a criminal political act, but it is
important that those in a position to defend us against it understand its
origins. My honest belief, Senator, is that our government has been derelict
in studying the causes of terrorism, even in the most elementary way, and
concentrates entirely on how to defend against it. It is a miracle that so
little damage was done in the World Trade Center bombing. There is no reason
to disbelieve that if there is a next time, the mind of that terrorist will
succeed in taking the twin towers down completely.

I could be writing this communique to a great many people, but I chose you
because you are primarily a communicator. You were picked out of your
community to run for the Senate in the first place because your radio talk
show demonstrated a profound willingness to communicate in a civilized manner.
You tell the truth as you see it and you listen respectfully to those who
communicate to you in similar fashion, even when there is not the slightest
chance that they will change your mind. This is what is missing in our foreign
policy, Senator. As long as we faced the communist nuclear threat, we did not
have the luxury of hearing petitions from those on the other side. Everything
is fair in war. Everything is not fair in peace, and we have not yet made the
adjustment. By that I mean that even after the Cold War ended, we continued
the practice of isolating those countries. Even this week, when the Iranian
prime minister held out an olive branch after 18 years of isolation, the first
reaction of our government was to reject his appeal for cultural exchanges. We
do not wish to communicate.

If there are many causes of political terrorism, the refusal of a stronger
power to communicate with a weaker power is the most important. In a family,
which is the smallest political unit, a father’s refusal to hear the
petition of his son, slamming the door in his face, is one that may have
positive effects if the son knows he deserves nothing but punishment, and
finally begs forgiveness without conditions. But even a righteous and wrathful
father should not expect positive results if he attempted to starve his son
and his son’s family into submission. Only outrage will result, and from
outrage springs political terrorism.

Our embargo against Iraq, I’m afraid, is perceived in the Islamic world as
an act of terrorism on our part. The estimated 1.4 million civilian deaths
that the U.N. attributes to the embargo weigh on the minds of potential
terrorists like Yousef, men who are pondering action without the knowledge of
their governments. We are not at war with Iraq. After seven years, we have
found no weapons of mass destruction which the Iraqis themselves did not lead
us to and help us destroy. It is reasonable for them to believe that we have
never had any intention of lifting the embargo. As an American citizen, I am
legally obliged to support the embargo, but I cannot help but agree with the
convicted terrorist, Yousef, that we are trying to punish Saddam Hussein by
punishing his people. The fact that we will not even permit our UN Ambassador,
Bill Richardson, to communicate with his counterpart in New York, is a policy
that invites terrorism. In Cuba, I know you continue to insist we should not
even consider normalization with the government . there until Castro leaves
the country. Wouldn’t your position be stronger if you said you are prepared
to hear what the Cuban government has in mind, that under satisfactory
conditions and penances on Havana’s part, the embargo could be relaxed or
lifted? Even a small opening of that kind creates the kind of hope that
discourages political terrorism. Don’t you think? The kind of outrage that
invites political terror cannot exist when there is any hope of adjudication
and redress.